[stcredzero]

So that’s what DevOps really is. You take a bunch of really skilled, passionate, talented people who don’t have their heads shoved so far up their own asses that they can take the time to learn new things.

What you want to look out for is the formation of "walls." People have an instinct to do this. People will form cliques -- which effectively are invisible barriers to understanding and honest collaboration.

In a 5 person startup, this is easy. You have one group. Most of the critical information flows are inside this boundary, and those which aren't, the group is already intensely aware of. (Investors, customers.)

However, when headcount has started to grow, and when you are forming a separate group to take on a task that requires intense collaboration, maybe you're doing the wrong thing? Maybe what you want is a separate role for people who get embedded in a variety of different groups? What if DevOps people belonged to DevOps, but also, and primarily, belonged with a particular group of developers? Then, they could have firsthand experience of intense collaboration, but also meet once a week with all the other DevOps role holders and communicate to standardize and avoid duplicated effort?

A generalization of this: Make sure you're building bridges and not compartments.